Stage 1

Stage 1 was great. I think we owe a little apology to the organizers. They obviously knew something about this course we didn’t know. On most flat roads 19 km would not have changed much, but the winds on the Atlantic coast made it a pretty significant day. However, we don’t owe them a full apology, as our point about substituting a long time trial with this mini-ITT is still valid. Ordinarily we’d see much more separation in the field. The last man, Leonardo Piepoli, was 4:40 behind the winner, but if you throw out the times of Zabriskie and Armstrong, who were so much better than everyone else, and Piepoli, who I assume must have fallen off his bike 2 or 3 times, the remaining 186 riders were separated by under 3 minutes. That just isn’t very much. Our complaint concerning the de-emphasis of the Race of Truth stands, but that didn’t stop Mayo, Heras, Totschnig, Mancebo, and Garzelli from losing 2+ minutes right out of the gate.

David Zabriskie beat Armstrong by 2 seconds and everyone else by a mile. What a nice way to start your first Tour! He’s only 26, but he already owns stage wins in all 3 Grand Tours. Now he owns the Tour record for fastest time trial, finally beating the old one set by Greg LeMond. Americans are pretty darn good at time trials.

Jan Ullrich must be demoralized after Lance Armstrong passed him during the race. This is a guy whose strongest feature is his time trial, and he got passed by his rival in a 19 km time trial. It’s in part because there was only a 1 minute gap (not 2) between them at the start, and possibly because he’s hurting from the crash he suffered yesterday. But excuses don’t change the blow to the morale or the fact that he’s 66 seconds behind Armstrong on day 1. He’s also 15 seconds behind Vinokourov, which is the opposite of what I expected. Obviously there is a lot of racing to go, but his Tour might already be ruined.

Certainly Armstrong is a big winner on the day. He put 53 seconds on Vinokourov and 1:22 on Basso. That’s a nice cushion to take to the team time trial. The whole team was great. Hincapie was 4th on the day; Rubiera and Popyvich were in the top 20. Beltran was the last guy from Discovery to cross the line, but he was 70th and he beat the entire Euskaltel team. However, CSC managed to beat Discovery in team time by 4 seconds on the strength of Zabriskie, Voigt, and Basso. If they can hold that lead, they will start last in the stage 4 TTT.